Facebook Tweaks News Feed to Prioritise ‘Informative’ Posts

In a move to make your News Feed more informative, Facebook has tweaked its algorithm to bring news that’s relevant and of interest to you.

“Our goal with News Feed is to show people the stories most relevant to them, so we rank stories so what’s most important to each person shows up highest in their News Feeds,” said Facebook in a blog post on Friday.

According to Jie Xu, Research Scientist, Akos Lada, Data Scientist and Vibhi Kant, Product Manager at News Feed, when Facebook rank and make improvements to News Feed, it rely on a set of core values.

“These values – which we’ve been using for years – guide our thinking and help us keep the central experience of News Feed intact as it evolves,” they wrote.

To better understand how the social media giant can show people the most informative stories to them, it talks to people and ask them how it can improve what they see when they check Facebook.

“With the new update, we are creating a new ranking signal to predict what is most informative to you, so those stories appear higher in your feed,” Facebook said.

“First, we look at the stories that people tell us they find informative. People from our Feed Quality Programme look at each story in their feed and rank it on a scale of one to five – one being ‘really not informative’ and five being ‘really informative’,” it added.

The stories people rate as informative and really informative help create a new prediction about how informative Facebook thinks hey will find each story.

“We then combine this signal with how relevant the story might be to you personally a” taking into account things like your relationship with the person or publisher that posted, or what you choose to click on, comment on or share a” to best predict stories that you might personally find informative,” the post read.